administrators

@maris

We’re currently working to see if there’s a way around this, but I did have a few suggestions that might be helpful in the meantime.

First, I think it would be helpful if we could figure out whether the Crash Repair Options dialogue is being caused by all three instances of Templater accessing the same project or whether it’s just a flag that is set when the AE instances are closed abruptly.

In your last message, you stated that once one project is opened, the other two instances immediately throw the Crash Repair Options dialogue. This doesn’t seem to be in line with the way that we’re seeing that flag operate, so I think it would be helpful if we could try booting up each instance of Templater in a slightly different order to confirm that the issue doesn’t occur unless the same file is accessed simultaneously.

If that’s the case, it might be useful to set the second and third instances of Templater to load up with a “dummy” project and then use the aep reserved column to switch them over to the main project file. This would allow us to boot the system up in a way that avoided accessing the same project simultaneously.

Another option that we might consider would be the use of a rudimentary Event Script to exit After Effects gracefully at the end of each day.

This is extremely basic, but I did some testing today with this script:

var exitFlag = $D.job.get("exit");
if (exitFlag === "y") {
	app.project.close(CloseOptions.DO_NOT_SAVE_CHANGES);
	app.quit();}

and got some excellent results. I registered this script to the “After creating output” event under “Output Processing”. It checks for a value in the Data Source named “exit” (with no quotes) and then closes After Effects if that flag is set to “y” (also with no quotes).

Using this method or something similar might allow us to close out Templater gracefully with a specific Job added at the end of each day when the reboot is set to occur. This might get us around the Crash Repair Options dialogue when the system is booted back up.

We’ll keep looking for better ways to get around this issue on this side, but I thought I’d throw this information out there in case it was worthwhile.

Thanks,

Jeff

@piercemotion I’m not positive what texts is referring to, but could you see if setting a “Footage” path and a “Destination” path in the Templater panel makes any difference?

@rick933 to add to Jeff’s reply, Templater uses a different licensing mechanism than aescripts’, so their automatic licensing system doesn’t work. If you are installing from the aescripts+aeplugins manager tool, you will need select Templater from your list of tools, and on the right side there is a “Licenses” button. You can copy the license from there and activate the key within Templater’s Preferences panel.

@rick933

The watermark in the screenshot is a result of Templater being in Trial Mode. That overlay should disappear once Templater is fully licensed, but for the length of the trial, it’ll be present over any asset that is using the Templater plugin.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you have any other questions, please let us know, and we’ll do whatever we can to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff

@maris

After taking a look at the latest update and consulting with our development team, it doesn’t seem like Adobe has included any programmatic way to close this new dialogue window. This means that, unfortunately, there isn’t really any way for Templater to suppress that options box from coming up in the case of a crash.

We can submit a feature request to Adobe, but it’s probably going to end up being easier to troubleshoot what’s causing the After Effects crashes in the first place since resolving that would keep us from having to deal with the “Crash Repair Options” dialogue window.

If that’s a solution you’d like to explore, please feel free to post some additional details about the sorts of crashes that we’re seeing here or get in touch with us directly at support@dataclay.com.

Thanks!

@citizensam

I’m unsure if I understand what we’re looking to accomplish here. I can say that Templater doesn’t support XML data files by default, but it does have support for PNG sequences.

Can we get a few more details on how this project is set up? What is meant when you say that each XML is a different PNG sequence? The more detail we can get on what you’re attempting to accomplish, the better we’ll be able to formulate a suggestion.

Let us know what you can and we’ll see where we need to go from there.

Thanks,

Jeff

@leeap

Due to the complexity of the information that can be contained in a single row of data in Google Sheets, Templater is pretty much limited to one row per render.

As far as speeding up the data entry, it should be possible to use some of the scripting, macros, and formulas available in Google Sheets to duplicate one row with the different options you’ll need, especially if they remain static for each output.

If the aspect ratio remains the same throughout, it might also be possible to output one video and then use a post-processing tool like FFMPEG to re-render the output into multiple resolutions. However, given the complexity involved in that sort of process, it will probably be easier just to duplicate the rows in Google Sheets.

Thanks!

@leeap

Templater can absolutely accommodate what you’re describing here. We’ll simply need to create a separate comp for each resolution/layout option and then designate which one should be rendered using the target reserved column in our Data Source.

By default, Templater will render the target comp specified in the Preferences panel or a default comp designated with double curly braces. However, both of these settings can be superseded by using a target value in our Data Source.

Once this value is set, Templater should render that specific comp rather than the ones set through the previously outlined methods. Using this technique, we should be able to create multiple target comps in different resolutions and then designate the render target through our Data Source. I’d recommend taking a look at this article from our support site:

for more information, and if you have any questions, please feel free to let us know.

Thanks!

@citizensam

Absolutely! New settings can be added to the “Render Settings” or “Output Module” through the existing After Effects tools located under the Edit>Templates menu. Once the new options are added, they should show up in the Templater panel once the “Load Settings & Module Templates” button is pressed.

As a quick side note, it might also be useful to use the module and render-settings reserved columns to set the output settings using information from the Data Source the project is using. As long as the data in these two columns match up with valid options in the “Render Settings” and “Output Module” options in AE, Templater should use them when each row is processed. This can be useful if we need to switch between different output modules on the fly.

Hopefully, that helps, but if you run into any issues, please feel free to get in touch, and we’ll do whatever we can to help out.

Thanks,

Jeff